Essential for every successful blogger, is to come up with interesting topics and unique content which allows them to shine. Having a great idea alone sometimes does not do it alone. To grow your blog you have a lot of little helpers who can assist in your mission.

Tools for Brainstorming Unique Ideas

There are services and platforms out there which can help you to find topics that people are interested in, trends, engagement relevant topics, and keywords that rank for your blog.

• AnwserThePublic is Best for finding the questions your audience is asking
• Google Trends is Best for finding topics that are trending in your industry
• Buzzsumo is Best for discovering content with the potential for engagement
• ahrefs is Best for researching keywords you can rank for

Tools for Writing and Taking Notes

Once we have found out the topic we want to write for we need to collect now information and put them all together. Having here handy tools will save time and helps to sort information and content.

Google Docs is Best for creating and storing documents

Google Docs helps you to build your best ideas together, in Google Docs you can create and collaborate with online documents in real-time and from any device anytime.

Evernote is Best for taking notes and keeping them organized

Evernote is the powerhouse when it comes to organizing your work in life. It helps you to remember everything and tackle any project with your notes, tasks, and schedule all in one place, don’t lose your ideas

Grammarly is Best for fixing spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors

Grammarly helps you to deliver great writing in a simplified way. You can achieve composing bold, clear, mistake-free writing with Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant.

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Hemmingway Editor is Best for reviewing web page features, formatting, and more

Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear. The app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow sentence, shorten or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red. You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouseover them for hints. Adverbs and weakening phrases are helpfully shown in blue. Get rid of them and pick words with force, perhaps. Phrases in green have been marked to show passive voice.

Tools to Optimize Your Content

Of course, a CMS system like WordPress for example comes with a lot of optional tools. Let’s look at some tools which are essential and help your blog to new heights. At this point, I also want to mention Caroline’s article on How to improve your content.

• Yoast SEO is Best for meeting technical SEO standards
• clearscope is Best for optimizing your blog for search engines
• LinkMiner Best for  starting a broken link building strategy
• Google PageSpeed Insights is Best for finding issues that are slowing down your blog

Tools to Create Stunning Visuals

A picture says more than 100 words. In today’s world where our audience is more focused on Audiovisual content, it is essential to pimp up your blog with more multi-media content. Let’s review some simple tools which work for every blogger.

Canva is Best for creating social media images, banners, and more

Canva is helping you with a graphic design platform to create social media graphics and other visual content relevant to your blog. You can start with a template or use your own creativity. The platform is free to use and offers paid subscriptions such as Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise for additional functionality.

Vectr is Best for creating vector graphics easily and intuitively

Vectr is a free-to-use Vector Graphics Editor for everyone. With Vectr you can step into the world of vector graphics, it helps you to design / edit vector graphics like a pro via its web and desktop cross-platform, without a steep learning curve.

Unsplash is Best for finding free stock photos to use in your blog

Pimp up your blog with royalty-free amazing photos. Unsplash is the ultimate source of freely-usable images powered by creators everywhere.

Gimp is Best for creating and editing images, icons, and more

The ultimate alternative to Adobe Photoshop for every blogger on this planet. The OpenSource program Gimp is a cross-platform tool that allows photo editing quick and efficient like its big brother.

Tools to Promote and Schedule Your Content

Now we are ready, our content is created, pimped up with shiny photos and cool stuff, time to get it noticed to the world. Who can help here now?

MailChimp is Best for promoting new articles via email

Mailchimp focuses on business and growing sales, this is where their promise is. In the free version, you can still generate beautiful emails out of templates that can engage your blogger community to grow your audience.

Sumo is Best for automating your blog’s email marketing

Sumo offers free tools to automate your site growth. Sumo comes also as a WordPress plug-in and fully integrated to your blogging home.

Buffer is Best for planning social media content for all platforms

Buffer is the most intuitive, affordable, and authentic way to reach more people on social media, share your blog on a proper calendar schedule with your audience.

Social Warfare is Best for adding share buttons to your blog

Social Warefare is the Best Social Sharing for WordPress, Social Warfare makes sharing your content fast and easy. Over 1,000,000 downloads and counting.

Tools to Stay Organized

Keep track of what you are doing and when you are doing it. Also if you are working in a team it might be useful to control team efforts.

• Google Calendar is Best for tracking events, reminders, tasks, appointment slots, etc.
• Asana is Best for improving team collaboration and work management
• Trello is Best for organizing your projects into whiteboards
• LastPass is Best for managing your passwords safely

Tools to Track Your Blog’s Performance

Now the truth needs to come out, we have done all possible to let our audience know our blog is here. So how can we see how we are doing? Which tools tell the truth?

• Google Analytics is Best for  tracking and reporting website traffic
• Google Search Console is Best for measuring your search traffic and performance
• Databox is Best for pulling data from different sources all in one place

This is it

You might think yourself, OMG do I really need all of this to grow my blog? How long will it take to learn all these products how to use? Well, most of them are so easy to use that the learning curve is not existing. Others might be more complex and we at Skillz Middle East can help you. Maybe not all of them are required for you, depending on how you arrange yourself and your team. Look closely and make your choice and succeed to grow your blog.